How does one rise to public office? In part, by flattering the sensibilities of those one seeks to serve.

Do you appeal to their higher nature, their sense of civic responsibility and interconnectness?

Or do you capitalize on pre-existing biases, stoking already simmering fears and resentments to the boiling point?

The world paid a ghastly price when Germany’s Chancellor and eventual Führer Adolf Hitler proved himself a master of the latter approach.

It seems like we’ve been hearing about Hitler’s rise to power a lot lately... and not in anticipation of the fast-approaching 80th anniversary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

We must always resist the temptation to oversimplify history, especially when doing so serves our own ends. There are way too many contributing factors to Hitler's ascendancy to squeeze into a five minute animation.

On the other hand, you can’t dump a ton of information on people’s heads and expect them to absorb it all in one sitting. You have to start somewhere.

Hitler’s reputation as a charismatic speaker is difficult to accept, given hindsight, modern sensibilities, and the herky-jerky quality of archival footage. He seems unhinged. How could the crowds not see it?

Perhaps they could, Gendler and Hazard suggest. They just didn't want to. Businessmen and intellectuals, wanting to back a winner, rationalized that his more monstrous rhetoric was “only for show.”

Quite an attention-getting show, as it turns out.

Could it happen again? Gendler and Hazard, like all good educators, present students with the facts, then open the floor for discussion.

Comments (9)

The lesson leaves the viewer with the feeling that anti-semitism was a recent product of Germany’s defeat in WWI; whereas anti-semitism is endemic in Europe and reaches back hundreds of years before Hitler.
The lesson came across to me as a cautionary tale for Trump supporters, and I think that is the intention. Now how about a cautionary story of how Lenin rose to power!? Nazism is long gone, but Communism marches on. Feel the Bern?

“We must always resist the temptation to oversimplify history, especially when doing so serves our own ends.”

Indeed!

“A public man has no right to let his actions be determined by particular interests. He does the same thing as a judge who accepts a bribe. Like a judge he must consider what is right, not what is advantageous to a party or class.” -Lord Acton

A cautionary tale for those who need to be cautioned. The anger, fear and hatred that Trump is fomenting in this country are terrifying. I have been worried that something like this could happen in the U.S. for a while. Seeing someone like Trump gaining power, and access to such tools as are available to those in power, I am quite worried about the potential for a racist ideology to take over the mainstream population.

As with Hitler and the Nazis, it would be less about actually supporting or embracing the so-called fringe ideas as it would be about downplaying them to support a populist and seemingly “conservative” rise.

The man is dangerous not because of his lack of experience as much as his lack of control. He says whatever comes to his mind, whenever it happens and cares no one whit for the consequences.

In fact, Trump cares for no one or no thing but himself. He is the ultimate representation of the “Me” generation and the damage that this kind of thinking can do. He is a sad little man, but one who, with his gaining popularity, frightens me.

It is amazing how just a few people in advantageous positions can cause enormous harm without people realizing how they are being manipulated. Gingrich as a political operative in the 70’s turning Republican fiscal conservative into tax cutting and spending fools with his two Santa Clause strategy. Then in the 80’s and 90’s with his list of combative words to use. Then all we needed was FOX and here again Giuliani used unethical means as mayor of NYC to get this obomination on the air. And the scandal they cut their teeth was Whitewater. Just takes a few unpatriotic narcissistic greedy people to create the backstory for Trump. God help the USA.

I think it cannot be conveyed enough that a deal of Hitler’s appeal came from the conservative German’s fear of Communism. When you couple that with Hitler’s successful strategy of making the Nazis appear to be savior against the Red movement in Germany, rise to power is not difficult to understand. Likewise, as Hitler and the Nazis managed to link Bolshevism with Judaism, this opened the floodgates for the anti-Semitic policies that followed. Regrettably, ignorance seems to breed even within a democratic nation, so Americans need to read more and play less. They need to pay attention and learn from history.

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.